I'm going to try to keep this diary short, because I have already said a lot about healthcare in my previous dairies. Basically, I just want to talk a little bit about this. The rate of economic change in this country is increasing, and a lot of things are not as they seem. I read an article yesterday on another blog about how the government economic statistics on inflation are woefully, artificially low, to the point of being fraudulent.

This led me to thinking, it seems to me that many businesses are, with a few notable exceptions, increasingly, not producing the kind of value-added products here that we expect them to - but they still have costs, like we all do. So, they are trying to extract more money from each transaction, often dishonestly.

We all need to watch out. That applies to politicians, too. Talk is cheap. Hope is cheap. Deeds are what counts.

I think that in a sense, we are heading into is a sort of new Dark Ages in which there are bandits lurking everywhere trying to take whatever they can from the common people, and the scary part of it is that they know that the natural instinct of many people is to seek help from the government.. but the real distinction is really between the powerful and the powerless.. Often the government and the bandits are in alliance.

I am not saying that that is the way things should be or even were, in the recent past, (I think the postwar period during which many of us grew up was a flirtation with a more egalitarian model) But it is historically, how things work.. A middle class is unusual, historically.

There's more...